H Patricia Hynes, “The Korean War: Forgotten, Unknown and Unfinished“, Truthout, 12 July 2013

On Veterans Day 2011, Korean War veteran Jack Tolbert spoke to a gathering at a Northern California cemetery. After relating his memories of serving in the war, among them covering a hand grenade with his lower body to save soldiers under his command, he remarked, “I’ve never understood why they insisted on calling it the Korean Conflict. After seeing the bodies I’ve seen, it was more like a war than anything else I’ve ever seen.”…

“The forgotten war” is correspondingly “the unknown war.” For Americans, the war spanned 1950-1953, and pitted a Soviet-backed communist dictatorship in the North against the anti-communist South, on whose behalf the US and UN intervened. In other words, it was a proxy war (the first) of the US against the Communist Soviet Union.

But for Koreans the war was essentially a civil war, with roots in Japanese colonialization since 1910 and in Japanese aggression, beginning in Manchuria in 1931-32, in which Koreans fighting with Chinese against Japan fought Koreans collaborating with Japan. Additionally, post-World War II rebellions within South Korea between peasants and South Korean authorities fueled divisions within Korea. The country is riven still by this civil conflict. The majority of South Korean elite and political leaders have been from right-wing families who collaborated with the Japanese; the autocratic power holders and geriatric military leaders of North Korea trace their lineage to the anti-colonial war against Japan. …

By fall 1951, both sides were locked in trench-like warfare around the 38^th parallel. Negotiations to end the war and the war itself dragged on until 1953, during which time the North was bombed into a wasteland by the US Air Force. The newly elected President Eisenhower chose – against the advice of his generals and MacArthur whom he had consulted – not to use atomic bombs that had been assembled on Okinawa (save for their nuclear core) and to negotiate a cease-fire. …

Bombing in war has always contravened UN conventions on war because cities, towns and infrastructure become their ultimate strategic target, and unarmed residents, their primary victims. Statistics on war tell the story. For three years, Korea – both South and North – was one single free-fire zone: A UN air assault demolished most of Seoul; the US Air Force carpet-bombed North Korea with incendiaries and explosives, dropping 635,000 tons of explosive bombs and up to 40,000 tons of napalm. The destruction within North Korean cities and towns ranged from 40 percent to nearly 100 percent. …

General MacArthur had boasted of a plan to win the war in 10 days: Drop 30 atomic bombs across the neck of Korea from sea to sea, leaving a belt of radioactivity between China and North Korea.

The US air war in Korea was so extreme as to be genocidal. General William Dean, as a POW in North Korea, observed that “most of the towns and villages he saw were just ‘rubble or snowy open spaces.'” Chief Justice William O. Douglas visited Korea in the summer of 1952 and avowed “I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe; but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea…” …

In the 1930s and ’40s, the Japanese procured an estimated 50,000 to 200,000 Korean women to sexually service soldiers in their war of aggression against China and during World War II. South Korean male functionaries and police operated as pimps for the Japanese, recruiting and forcing young women from their villages into military sexual slavery. South Korean soldiers who joined the Japanese army also used the “comfort women,” as they were spuriously called. When the Korean War began in 1950, the South Korean army set up the same system of enslaving local women in brothels for their own use. When the war ended, with their lives having been ruined, many victims of this organized sexual slavery continued in the system of “kijoch’on” (military camptown) prostitution organized and regulated by the American and South Korean governments. …

A group of former prostituted women is now seeking compensation and an apology from the South Korean government for their complicity in the sex trade surrounding the American bases. The words of a 71 year-old woman capture the inestimable price paid by women trapped on men’s battlefields: “…I think that women like me were the biggest sacrifice for my country’s alliance with the Americans…Looking back, I think my body was not mine, but the government’s and the US military’s.” …

Three years after the beginning of the war, a cease-fire was finally signed. Everything was back to where it had been at the beginning, with almost the same [arbitrary] borders as before the war and the same unfulfilled dream of reunification. No one had won. Everyone had lost. The war is calculated to have cost the lives of up to 5 million people, by far the majority of them civilians. …

In a recent lecture at Lafayette College, former US president and Korean War veteran, Jimmy Carter spoke bluntly about American militarism: “Almost constantly since World War II, our country has been at war.” He added that he could not think of any place on earth today where the United States is working to promote peace – nor could the then-new Secretary of State John Kerry when Carter queried him.

Regarding North Korea, Carter traced the current crisis to the Bush administration’s abrogation of a 1994 agreement with North Korea that assured North Korea would not develop nuclear weapons in exchange for energy and economic aid. In the early 1990s, Carter was asked by the North Korean leader Kim II Sung to come to North Korea “because,” he said, “no one in the US government would talk to the North Koreans.” After persuading the adverse Clinton administration for permission, he met with Kim II Sung who expressed the desire for a peace treaty with the United States and to have the economic embargo lifted against his country. The result of their talks was a successful diplomatic agreement that ended the Korean nuclear weapons program in exchange for lifting of an economic embargo, allowing Americans to search for the remains of Korean war veterans, a peace treaty and so on.

The Bush administration dismantled that agreement and included North Korea in the “Axis of Evil” countries, making it an explicit target of regime change. North Korea responded by re-starting a nuclear weapons program, weapons testing and chest-beating war rhetoric. The Obama administration has, in turn, ratcheted up war games with South Korea, including a simulated nuclear attack on North Korea, and tightened the economic stranglehold on banking and trade. Thus, a small, poor country wasted by its own militarization and the world’s hypermilitarized superpower are locked in an asymmetric nuclear standoff.

Carter concluded his address at Lafayette College: “I’ve been there two or three times since the 1994 agreement, and I can tell you what the North Koreans want is a peace treaty with the United States and they want the 60-year economic embargo lifted against their people, so they can have an equal chance to trade and commerce. It’s a very paranoid country. They are honestly convinced that the United States wants to attack them and destroy their country, to eliminate the Communist regime. They make a lot of mistakes, but if the United States would just talk to the North Koreans…I believe…we could have peace, and the United States would be a lot better off in the long run.”

Many expert commentators agree, adding that, when polled, the majority of South Koreans consider the United States a greater threat than North Korea. The US policy of sanctions, isolation, and war games has led to a downward spiral of nuclear buildup in North Korea, continuing US militarization in the region, bolstering of right-wing forces in South Korea and Japan, and greater risk of another war on the Korean peninsula. The United States needs to talk to North Korea, as Carter and others have emphasized, and to change our belligerent foreign policy into one that seeks peace after 60 years of war by other means.

Read the full article here.